As we drove through the spectacular crimson and carroty foliage here, it dawned on me that this is when we’ve always visited this state, in the autumn. No better time to see it, I guess, since West Virginia is something like 80% forested. Some of our most dramatic leafy views were provided as we drove the last few miles into Charleston’s Kanawha State Park along an awfully narrow mountain-side gravel road. Their license plates sum it up well… “Wild and Wonderful.”

Continuing on the wild theme, we took a tour of the West Virginia Penitentiary (now empty) in Moundsville. The oldest part was built in the 1800’s and took in Civil War prisoners. Most lately, it housed hundreds of maximum security prisoners, through 1995. These were some bad mamma-jammas, too. There were well over 100 murders carried out in here, plus a handful of riot and hostage situations. And it’s not like they cleaned up and repainted the joint, either. All of the inmate’s unadulterated scrawlings remain on the cell walls. You could kind of get a feel for each of their sinister personalities. There’s a section of the jail that housed women prisoners here too, and in fact, Charles Manson’s ma did a seven year stint here.

Point Pleasant is the little town that, for a 13-month span during the 1960’s, was home to an enormous number of sightings of the Mothman. The movie ‘Mothman Prophecies’ is based on what occurred here, but to sum it all up… Mothman is an eerie figure, about the size of a man, with leathery grey wings that span about ten feet. Its eyes are really large and have a sort of red luminosity. They’re apparently almost hypnotic to look at. The Mothman was seen by all sorts of credible, um, West Virginians, some of which stood face-to-face with it. The last sighting of the creature was on December 15, 1967, when Point Pleasant’s Silver Bridge collapsed into the icy Ohio River, killing forty-six people. Anyway, the reason I brought this up is because we visited some of the locations of where Mothman was sighted. Pretty cool.